WikiLeaks could alter way diplomats relay info: expert

OTTAWA – WikiLeaks could put a chill on the way diplomats perform
their basic function of keeping their masters in the loop with blunt written
assessments of the players and politics in the nations where they’re posted.

The release by WikiLeaks of reams of potentially embarrassing American
diplomatic cables may mean more verbal reporting and fewer paper trails in the
future, says Queen’s University expert Kim Nossal.

Governments will likely be less inclined to have their diplomats produce a
written record of observations and recommendations about the players and
politics wherever they’re stationed if it’s likely to be revealed while
everyone is still in place.

“It’s never supposed to come out for another 50 years and by the time it’s
all published, most of the principals are dead and it becomes the stuff of
history,” said Nossal, a political studies professor and expert in Canada-U.S.
relations, Canadian foreign policy and defence.

“What we generally aren’t confronted with is their bluntness and their
honesty, bumping off the front page of the newspaper in the here and now.”

Canada is among an array of countries around the world which have been given
what a U.S. embassy spokesperson called “a heads up” about the WikiLeaks
documents dump that may occur this weekend or next week.

Speculation about what’s in the documents ranges from allegations of
corruption against foreign governments and reports on politicians in Russia and
Afghanistan, to notes exposing behind-the-scenes Canada-U.S. diplomacy over
Omar Khadr, the Canadian-born man imprisoned at the U.S. military base in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I think there is a problem in the longer term, that if in fact you get
this giant dump and if in fact the embarrassment is as huge as the American
government appears to be thinking it will, what you’re going to find is that
there simply won’t be stuff to leak, that officials already inclined not to put
stuff on paper anyway, will increase that,” Nossal said.

“Essentially it will increase governments’ efforts to try and control the
flow of information. It may well be an impossible task, but if there’s a kind
of global embarrassment of the United States government, there will be some
negative consequences in terms of how diplomats (operate) in the future.”

If it’s like WikiLeaks’ previous document releases, a select few newspapers
are given weeks to troll the material and write stories, with the rest of the
world’s media poring through the Internet afterward. Britain’s Guardian
newspaper and the New York Times may get the ball rolling this weekend.

Tens of thousands of pages of classified internal notes leaked by the outfit
a few months ago on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had little consequence for
Canada.

One note categorizing the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan on
Sept. 2, 2006 as a “friendly fire” incident was discounted by witnesses and
the public record, supporting the Defence Department’s finding that the leaked
document was “obviously incorrect.”

A second document established that the death of a Canadian military
photographer Master Cpl. Darell Jason Priede was by a heat-seeking, surface-to-
air missile rather than a rocket-propelled grenade as widely reported. The
report confirmed for the first time that the Taliban had access to a kind of
weapon previously undisclosed by the U.S. military.